Delta SkyMiles Rewards Customers Well

How have I managed to earn 40,000 Delta Skymiles in the last year? Have I really been traveling that much? I mean, yeah, I get skymiles for using my AmEx card but that's surely not more than 1/3 of those miles I've earned since using 48,000 of them for a round trip ticket to Manila (valued at $1,400) last June. That was a pretty sweet deal. Delta's rewards program is actually pretty good. Domestic round trip tickets including Canada are between 25,000 and 40,000 miles, depending on whether it's a peak travel time or not. So, that's well worth it if I were to fly somewhere more expensive than ATL-MSY (New Orleans), only a $200 ticket anyway, where I am going next week. But for a $400 cross-country flight or an even more expensive flight to Canada which are disproportionally expensive if bought normally, it's a good deal.

Flying from Atlanta, a round-trip to Boston (946 miles) costs $229 while a round-trip to Montreal (993 miles) costs $509 but if you use an award ticket, they cost the same number of miles. Even more absurd is the round trip to Toronto: 739 miles, $595, and still 25,000 to 40,000 skymiles. I guess a lot of the difference is because Montreal and Toronto are technically international, but more than double the price?

I've been thinking about how I'm going to pack for this 10 day trip to New Orleans. I don't think my backpack will be big enough and anything else I have would probably need to be checked in and I loathe the whole system of paying $25 to check in a bag. Then again, I've never flown domestically for a trip longer than 4 nights so I guess I'll have to suck it up and either do laundry there or check-in a bag or get a bigger bag. Then I realized, Delta has done another nice thing lately - 1 free check-in bag for Gold AmEx Delta card holders. That includes me. Problem solved.